19 May—The big news today is the Trump family. They’re all big. Tall, anyway. The tallest Trump is also the youngest. Eighteen-year-old Barron, whose graduation from the imaginatively named Oxbridge Academy in West Palm Beach recently made the headlines, is an impressive 6’7” tall. His mother, Melania, is an equally impressive 5’11”.

Like her stepmother, Ivanka Trump is an impressive 5’11” tall. Her mother, the late Ivana, was 5’9 ½”. As for Ivana’s male issue, Eric is 6’5” but Donald Jr.’s height is only 6’1”.

Donald Trump’s middle wife, Marla, and daughter Tiffany both are 5’8”.

As for Donald Trump himself, he’s obviously a big man, but not, unfortunately, in the sense that he’s magnanimous or at all worthy. As far as height is concerned, though, when in April of last year he was booked as a criminal in New York his height was said to be 6’2” but when he was booked as a criminal in Georgia just three months later he had miraculously gained an inch in height.

(Trump didn’t pose for a mug shot in New York and his Georgia mug shot has him scowling in front of a blank wall.)

So would the miracle of an old man gaining height qualify Donald Trump for sainthood? Certainly a job for the Devil’s Advocate. That’s not really necessary, though, as Trump has a religiously fervent and fanatical following without formal beatification. And would even his most ignorant admirers call him saintly?

Anyway, another Trump miracle, of course, is that between his New York and Georgia bookings, while gaining an inch in height he had lost 25 pounds in weight. Truth be told, losing 25 pounds in three months isn’t really a miracle—and not that hard. Many of us have accomplished it through exercise, starvation, or both. The miracle is keeping it off.

(We won’t speculate about Donald Trump’s girth. It’s obvious and considerable and evidently classified information that’s still in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom.)

“Exercise,” as Horace Rumpole sagely observed, “is a shortcut to the cemetery.” But can you imagine Donald Trump starving on his legendary fast- and junk-food diet?